shocking news from nme via the other rachel:
we’re back home from lost angels.
we were supposed to get back yesterday, but hmc was running around with wet shoes from the flood in the laundry room due to the mischievious rag, and ended up falling down the stairs and landing hard on her arse. she doesn’t think that anything’s broken, but her arse is achey and things like standing and sitting are quite uncomfortable, making the prospect of a six hour drive not that exciting.
instead we set out this morning, spurred on by the early morning arrival of a photo shoot in the house where we were staying. it’s for a product called an iport (where do these marketing geniuses come up with this?), which basically is a dock that you install in your wall so you can come home and slap your ipod onto your house and play music. although i’m not sure why you wouldn’t just hook up your computer to your stereo with an airport express instead. perhaps it’s the remote control, but then the exciting roku comes with one too. the iport at the photo shoot did seem to come with a very pretty model named melissa, so maybe that’s it.
there were two good things about driving up today:
1. better weather. no rain in lost angels at all, and pretty clear halfway up the 5. the other half was mostly just light rain, until it started pouring when we got home to the bay area. welcome back, suckers!
2. we finally made it to the fabled indian food place! it’s not really halfway, more like 3/4 of the way to lost angels. it’s off of the buttonwillow exit, about 1 1/2 hours north of lost angels, maybe 72 miles south of harris ranch. however, it is really yummy indian food, and considering your other options on the 5, that makes it excellent indian food. here’s the deets:
Taste of India
20687 Tracey Ave
Buttonwillow, CA 93206
661-764-6464
make sure you stop by the next time you have to drive back or forth! and send good thoughts to hmc’s arse.
the house where i’m staying has a starfish in the bathroom, as a decorative object. it certainly works, since it’s on the end of the bathtub, so it fits right in as an aquatic-related item.
however, i was looking at it the other day and wondering, why is this cool, yet taxidermy is creepy?
they’re both dead bodies, right? it’d be really strange and wrong to have a stuffed dog in the bathroom, but why is a starfish all right? it’s not even stuffed, it’s just the dead exoskeleton! yet it doesn’t set off the creepymeter, not like something mounted on a plaque or posed in some faux-nature diorama.
perhaps it’s the fact that it’s not mammalian in nature, or that it doesn’t have two arms and two legs to identify with. it’s naturally strange enough in shape that its form registers as abstract, both in life as well in death. it’s a weird thing first, and a dead thing second.
meanwhile, they’re trying to plastinate giant squid:
Von Hagens invented plastination while at the University of Heidelberg in the 1970s. The process involves replacing water and fat in the corpse with a polymer, and it has allowed him to exhibit dissected human bodies in life-like poses. But a giant squid, with its lack of a rigid internal skeleton for support, and relatively poorly understood circulatory system, poses some novel challenges.
…
The plastination process could take up to a year, and the squid will need a rigid framework for support, but O’Shea is confident that von Hagens will be able to display the animals.
you can’t really complain about it raining in lost angels when at least there aren’t 9.0 earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis.
however, it’s good to know that action stars like jet li survived relatively unscathed:
Li, who played the villain in “Lethal Weapon 4,” was with his daughter in the hotel’s lobby Sunday when huge waves gushed into the hotel, the Apple Daily newspaper reported, quoting a friend vacationing with Li.
Li slightly injured his foot while picking up his daughter, the report said. Ming Pao Daily News reported Li struck his foot against a floating piece of furniture.
czech supermodel and sports illustrated swimsuit cover girl petra nemcova wasn’t so fortunate, however:
was injured and her photographer boyfriend is missing after the pair were caught up in the Asian tsunami disaster, a spokeswoman for the boyfriend said Tuesday.
Nemcova and British photographer Simon Atlee had been vacationing in the resort of Phuket when the waves swept over them on Sunday, said Atlee’s agent, Eve Stoner.
“She is in hospital and he is missing. We don’t have any further information than that at the moment,” Stoner said,
The Sun newspaper reported Tuesday that Nemcova clung to a tree for eight hours as the water swirled around her. It said she suffered a shattered hip and internal injuries.
i’ve always been a kobe fan, but it’s getting harder and harder. the media’s certainly turned against him, but even resisting against that tide, it’s harder and harder to be a fan. between the troubles in colorado and then the power struggle last year, shattering the lakers and sending phil back to retirement and shaq out to the heat, and now the crazy shit with mailman and vanessa, who knows what’s going on?
and from the new york times yesterday:
Bryant was once the N.B.A.’s alternative programming to its hip-hop players when he arrived as a pop star that the Volvo crowd could embrace. He had Eminem in his music file but projected Osmond. And while other players had strip-club punch cards, Kobe soon had a wife waiting for him at his Pacific Palisades mansion.
…
He was the great suburban icon as the son of a former N.B.A. journeyman from the upper-class outskirts of Philadelphia. He was worldly, but all ball, preferring Michael Jordan game tapes over PlayStation videogames.
…
Where did Bryant go wrong in his imitation of M. J.? It began somewhere in suburbia, with his needs indulged by a doting family, the ball always in his hands.
Somehow, this sheltered existence left him arrested in development and devoid of street savvy. Bryant never learned the N.B.A. code: choose pole dancers over hotel clerks, teammates who make you better and discretion over snitching.
if you can’t get the grandmothers to love you, how can you expect anyone else to?
so what’s the deal?
i’ve been back for weeks now, and somehow i just can’t get into the habit. i’ve dropped of the side of the earth, without much of a trace.
granted, it’s an awkward time to come back, as there’s much to do: not only is there three weeks of work to catch up on, there’s suddenly the holidays to prepare for, endure, and then recover from.
and somehow, i don’t know, maybe it’s more than that.
when i was on our honeymoon, i would dutifully record little snippets and write them down so i could enter them here later when i stopped in and could get internet access. i’d type them into our woefully underpowered laptop, and then keep them on a usb memory stick (which, btw, has more memory than the laptop!!) and then upload them at an internet cafe.
however, hmc had bought a journal that she intended as a travel diary for us both, and this ended up precluding that. i offered to write it in both, but she ended up being a little dispirited, and gave up the project.
it makes me think about where i’m putting in my energy and intentions. a lot of the “space” between things where i used to write or post are now are taken up by actually living with a wife. it’s funny to say, but it’s much more time consuming to be with your spouse instead of just seeing her a couple of weekends a month.
it’s certainly not a bad thing, but you don’t get the chance to run off and sit on the computer at the odd time of day. it’s just strange and silly when you can be with the one you love instead.
w and dr mike wanted to go see the new zhang yimou film, the house of flying daggers, because it’s opening this weekend.
only we saw it last saturday when we were in lost angels.
sorry, suckers!
how was it? it was pretty good. i certainly like hero better, and maybe a lot of that is the absence of christopher doyle’s cinematography. i while i was watching the movie i kept somehow wanting the shots to be more saturated than they were because of this.
this movie is also kind of silly. there are some silly things in here, like a whole team of bamboo tree warriors. in crouching tiger, it was believable that chow yun fat and zhang ziyi could do the tree-fighting thing, because they were master martial artists, right? but a whole division of bamboo tree warriors? maybe it’s just that such a thing smacks more of the silliness of old-school low budget kung fu flicks, and since this is more of the new art-house style, it’s somehow less acceptable, less dignified. if you’re going to do the merchant ivory approach to martial arts films, why have silly things like that?
and there’s a really ridiculous thing at the end, which sort of works, but is really silly.
are you ready to go visit the ramen noodle theme park?
man, why did they tell me this before we went on our honeymoon?
i’m trying out mozilla thunderbird, which is their open source mail/news client to replace outlook express. for no particular reason except that i’m a glutton for tech punishment. or perhaps that being back from vacation and trying to catch up on work and mail and bills and magazines and a full tivo isn’t enough of a challenge, so i might as well throw something else on top of the to-do pile.
or is that to prevent me from getting to the to-do pile?
useless stats: during my vacation, i received 956 personal emails and this blog was hit with 439 spam comments.
on the plus side, thunderbird seems to be working very well. i’ve been using it for the better part of a day, and it not only installed very well, it transferred my settings pretty seamlessly and i haven’t uninstalled it in an apoleptic fit yet.
what do other people do for fun?
my lomo camera died about a week into the honeymoon. i thought it might have just been old batteries, but i replaced them and still no go. which means that i could still take shots, but the light meter (and the cool auto exposure feature) didn’t work, so i was sort of shooting blind.
we actually stumbled on a lomo store in darlinghurst, which is the lomo world embassy for australia. they actually knew of a lomo doctor in sydney, who had parts and could actually fix it! however, when we took it to him, it would have taken too long for him to look at it, and we would have been in new zealand by then. so no lomo.
thus this explains why all my shots are digital, taken with the conveniently tiny canon powershot sd10. on the plus side, this let me digitize everything and put it up quick quick!
here are the last set of shots. since they’re from new zealand, there’s a lot of scenery here. it’s spectacular!
we’re back in the states. and only ten hours before we actually left! thank/curse you, international date line!
various detritus:
here’s my last vacation story. maybe.
while we were on our rainforest walk around dunk island, we saw lots of brush turkeys. inevitably we would run on two female turkeys walking head of us on the path. when we got close to them they would split in different directions, one to the left and one to the right. maybe this is instinctual to either confuse the predator or to at least make sure that one of them would survive.
i found that walking around in australia and new zealand, when we would encounter anyone walking towards us on the sidewalk, we would essentially do the same thing: i would go to the left, hmc to the right. i think i was trying to do what was expected since they drive on the left so they walk on the left, and i don’t know what hmc was trying to do.
but maybe we’re just brush turkeys at heart.
for the last day here, we decided to get the hell out of dodge and spend the day relaxing. we chose a small little japanese-style thermal bath resort, about 2 1/2 hours northeast of christchurch in lewis pass, deep in the middle of the southern alps.
to make it a little more fun, we called around and were able to rent a mini cooper for our drive.
as you may know, they drive on the left in new zealand and australia, probably legacies of being part of the british commonwealth. i don’t know why canada isn’t the same way, but it’s just as well as it would probably cause a little confusion at our northern border. having never driven in a left-hand drive country before, i was a little nervous, as i was already having enough trouble trying to remember which way to look when crossing the street (both ways, repeatedly. and then again. maybe i’ll just wait for the beeping walk sign instead?). however, if i’ve learned anything in christchurch, it’s that you can pretty much drive anywhere you want in new zealand. not only were people driving on the left hand side of the road, but they were swerving around on the right sides, and frequently up onto the sidewalks as well. so, what, me worry?
it turns out that it’s not too bad at all. you just have to concentrate really hard for the first few minutes, and fight that instinct to drive on the right. but if you really pay attention it’s not so bad. it’s certainly easier than convincing yourself that you can breathe underwater.
the maruia thermal springs resort were quite cute and remote, nestled up in the mountains. it certainly was spectacular up there, and by spectacular i mean that it was raining and 48 degrees cold. however, if you’re soaking in a hot thermal bath, none of that really seems to matter anymore. they’ve got hot pools for the public, but we opted for the traditional japanese bath houses, which don’t allow clothing. although i think hmc got the better of that deal, since they’re also sex-segregated, and would you rather look at naked men or naked women? exactly. it was impressive to sit in the bath and look out onto a pristine tree-covered mountain, nestled in a valley of clouds, though. you certainly don’t get that in muskogee. we also booked a private bath for later that evening, which was excellent for a last night of honeymoon relaxing soak.
as for the mini, it was a lot of fun. it handled really well, although i couldn’t really tell exactly how well, as i didn’t know my km-miles conversion so i had no idea how fast i was going. had i known that 100km/hr is only about 60mph, i would have tried to go faster around those turns. the big plus is that it’s probably around the same length as my miata, but with the back seats we could actually bring along our two large suitcases, which wouldn’t even be a possibility in my car. i love it! i want one!
today we finally got up early enough to take the tranzalpine:
The TranzAlpine includes both one way seating and tabled group seating. Both styles allow you to experience the amazing views while enjoying the company of other passengers on-board. An open air viewing carraige allows you to get even closer to the stunning scenery and provides many opportunities to photograph your favourite spots. There’s a lot to look forward to!
Our journey is 223.8 kilometres long and takes just four and a half hours. There are 16 tunnels, and 5 viaducts, the highest being the Staircase standing at 73 metres.
it’s a nice train ride, although on the way out to greymouth i don’t know if it was the gentle rocking of the train or that it was too stuffy or maybe it’s too hard getting up that early, but we ended up sleeping through a lot of that alleged beautiful scenery.
we did get to see it on the way back as we made the return trip the same day, but the down side is that while the views were beautiful, the conductor’s “colorful” narration became quickly tedious, with essentially the same facts and even jokes parroted on the way back. it was as if you were forced to sit on the disneyland jungle ride over and over, which i understand disneyland fans actually do for fun, but i’d rather be on mr. toad’s wild ride. or even the teacups.
we realized on the way back that what we had done was to spend a full day travelling, in order to get exactly nowhere: ending up in the same place where we started.
what also didn’t help was by living and scheduling our itinerary and lodging day to day, today we had to change hotels inconveniently while remaining in christchurch, so we put in all the effort of going somewhere else, but not actually doing so in any great sense.
they say that the tranzalpine is one of the top six scenic train rides in the world. i don’t know what the other five are, but i’m guessing the polar express is not one of them.
we flew down to christchurch yesterday, as part of a madcap plan to see some spectacular new zealand scenery in our last remaining days.
“go to the south island,” everyone says. “it’s spectacular there!”
spectacular apparently being a code word for rainy.
our madcap plan, was this: fly down to christchurch yesterday, take the train across the southern alps and then a bus down to the franz josef glacier today, heli-tour of the glacier tomorrow (“not to be missed!” exclaims the travel brochure and guidebook), all day bus down to queenstown on thursday, and then fly back to auckland friday to catch our flight back to lost angels.
only we didn’t do that.
when faced with getting up at 6am in order to catch the 8:15 train, and then three more days of constant travel, we sleepily decided, “fuck you, franz joseph glacier! we don’t need you!
the down side of our icefloe impudence is that we’re stuck here in christchurch with not much to do. it’s not quite as incredibly compact as wellington, and does claim to be the art center (centre) of new zealand. and of course there’s the eponymous cathedral in the middle of the city, which is not so impressive that they felt that putting a large metal sculpture resembling a giant waffle cone on fire next to the church was a bad thing.
the plus side was that we did have our best new zealand meal in christchurch, at cook’n with gas, which is a fantastic little restaurant where they served the most delicious food and had a great wine selection. if you’re stuck in christchurch, you might as well salvage the time by eating here.
(traveller’s tip: if you’re flexible, qantas seems to have great e-ticket fares for flying from city to city. and the best thing is, they get even cheaper the day of the flight, instead of the other way around. instead of booking our tickets the day before for NZ$115/pp, we ended up getting tickets the same day for NZ$70/pp!)
new zealand sucks. it’s cold and rainy here. not just cold, not just rainy, but fucking freezing cold and fucking freezing rainy.
why did we leave sydney again? oh yeah, because we tried to change our plans at the last minute and it would have cost us half as much to stay here later. or for good.
despite being cold and rainy, wellington has the plus side of, uh…
the brochures and marketing materials keep repeating the plus that welllington is new zealand’s most english-style city, and that it’s incredibly compact. plus, they keep quoting statistics like, more cafes per capita than new york city, which is pretty fucking easy when you’ve only got like 300k people in an incredibly compact city.
i keep getting lost because i keep walking too far. i look on the map and think “ok, it’s just two more blocks,” and i find that i’ve walked past the two blocks while i’m looking at the map.
are you getting the incredible compactness yet?
there do seem to be a lot of nice little clothing stores with local designers here. hmc found some great stuff which i’m now carrying around. somehow her luggage is getting lighter, while mine gets heavier. maybe i should stop packing so well and offering to carry stuff she can’t fit in.
wellington sits on a large sloping hill that rolls down to the harbor, sort of like hong kong. however, i think wellington has more almost everything per capita than hong kong.
because it’s incredibly…
i recall back in the day the first concert i ever saw. it was almost big country, with their eponymous hit song (but what do you do for a follow-up? keep changing the name of your band?), but i couldn’t quite clear that hurdle with my parents in time. however, this did pave the way for my actual first concert, which also ended up being my favorite band growing up, those oddly unattractve australians, men at work. i remember my dad driving me all the way up to lansing just to see them, the money that i kept in my shoe leaving a green spot on my sock, and some kid asking me the next morning, “how was inks? how was inks?” and i replied, “uh, ok,” before i realized that he was asking about the opening act, the little-known INXS.
so after all these years, who was just happening to play sydney while we were here and we had to go get tickets to see?
well, pj harvey, of course.
she was playing her first headline tour here, and we caught her first of two shows in sydney, this on at the enmore theatre. although we didn’t decide to do it and bought our tickets just five hours before the show, we ended up with great seats, in the third row right behind the standng section, which basically meant that you also stood like everyone else, but you were higher than the regular standing people and they couldn’t crowd you on account of the actual chairs. which means we got a great view of polly jean, who was wearing a white “pj harvey” t-shirt, and had a little purse with the initials “PH”. and a kick-ass dress with animal from the muppet show across the front.
and yes, it was wonderful. we missed the first few songs because we were eating at this incredible restaurant called edna’s table, where they serve delightful dishes using indigenous recipies and native ingredients. hmc had the emu as an entree and then enoki mushrooms wrapped with wallaby as a main, while i opted for the sesame-covered crocodile and the seared kangaroo.
the next day we went to the zoo to see everything we had eaten, which is probably better as that way you won’t feel bad during your meal.
on second thought, i think my first concert might have been to see the fixx. i’m not sure the story works quite as well that way, though.
(pictures of sydney in the gallery…)
we’re in sydney right now, having flown here yesterday. it’s quite lovely indeed, with gorgeous landmarks and nice public areas where people are out at night, strolling around. hmc likens it to london, but with good weather. we’ve been noticing recently about how some cities are active and alive at night and some less so, and she thinks that it’s due to the presence (or lack) of communal gathering areas where people can just congregate and be out at night, thus creating a nightlife. places like new york, sydney, and lots of european cities. much unlike los angeles, or even san francisco to a degree. lost angels certainly doesn’t have any sort of city center, and one may argue that it even lacks a true city, but a lot of this may also just reflect on what is seen as entertainment when the cities were most vibrant, or even now. in the past you went out and sat and looked at people and talked to your neighbors. now people sit at home and watch everyone loves raymond reruns to amuse themselves.
today we went on what may be the true sign that i’ve either become whipped or mad: the sydney harbour bridge climb. they outfit you in climbing suits, strap you in with harnesses and cables, tie down anything loose that you’re wearing (provided hat, provided handkerchief, sunglasses), and then you climb up onto the actual harbour bridge, over the top of the actual arch, above the eight lane roadway and railway, 134 metres (442 feet) in the air. given that i’m mildly acrophobic, this sounded like the third last thing i’d ever want to do (1. skydiving, 2. bungee jumping), but everyone we talked to said that it was the most incredible experience and not to be missed, from adrian the pharmacist from our reef dive, to lost angels wife #2 melissa lekus.
i survived, and it was pretty spectacular. the views are incredible, and there are only a few harrowing parts here and there. there are the parts where you’re 49 metres above the road below but still on a tiny catwalk below the bridge, and then there’s the part where you’re making the long climb up onto the arch on these little metal ladders. however, once you’re up on the arch, it’s pretty large and substantial, so you don’t feel bad at all, even with all the trains and the traffic below. plus, the guides are great, very reassuring, and also filling in interesting tidbits about the bridge, its construction, and also other landmarks that you see around you for miles.
luckily we finished before it started raining later in the day, as they do the climb at whatever time you’ve booked it for, regardless of rain or shine, and at night as well. safely back in the bridgeclimb center, we looked at the pictures of people who had gone before us, such as laurence fishburne, prince harry, chelsea clinton, cate blanchett, and al and tipper gore.
at night we hooked up with anthony wong who played jada pinkett’s sidekick in the matrix 2/3. hmc became friends with him during the matrix shoot back in alameda, and he lives in sydney so we looked him up. we went around on a sleepy drizzly night to see the sights, and he took us to a fantastic looking laotian restaurant, pink peppercorn, where i didn’t eat a bite. not that it didn’t look incredibly tasty, but i was still stuffed from having eating earlier that day at chinese noodle restaurant, where we had two noodle dishes (including these amazingly delicious broad flat wheat noodles, which are the best of that kind i’ve ever had!) and a plate of pork and chives dumplings, of which i ate 15 1/2.
between those and the tasty dinner we had the night before at sailor’s thai, every meal in sydney has been fantastic so far!